Adulation and isolation: colleagues abandon Charlie Teo as supporters keep the faith

By Kate McClymont

Charlie Teo outside the disciplinary hearing in Sydney this week.Credit:Wolter Peeters

When it came to support for controversial neurosurgeon Charlie Teo, the chasm between his patients and his peers could not have been more vast.

“It’s either going to be a good day for Australian medicine or a bad day,” said Teo reflecting on the possible outcome of his eight-day disciplinary hearing which concluded this week.

His loyal supporters, rallied into action by texts and emails they received from Teo, loudly proclaimed their love.

But in the small hearing room on the sixth floor of an unremarkable Sydney office block near Central Station, the silence from his neurosurgical colleagues had been profound.

Charlie Teo is greeted by supporters as he leaves the last day of his inquiry.Credit:Nick Moir

Not a single letter of support from an Australian or New Zealand neurosurgeon was provided to the four-person committee hearing allegations regarding Teo’s lack of insight, lack of judgment, lack of empathy, failure to obtain informed consent and conduct that falls short of expected professional standards.

Asked about this lack of backing outside the hearing, Teo said, “When all this went down, I thought I had a whole lot of neurosurgical friends. And I would write to them and send messages to them … they just didn’t reply.”

His lawyers also came up empty-handed. Teo told the media he felt the lack of support was because of the potential for a supportive colleague to be blackballed, to join him in becoming “an enemy of the fraternity”.

For years, the media has perpetuated the narrative that Teo is uniquely talented and performs operations beyond the skill and ability of his colleagues.

In a combative display in the witness box, Teo routinely dismissed the expert opinions of three neurosurgeons, including the expert called by his own legal team. “I don’t expect them to know as much as I do,” he said angrily. “I have more experience with brain-stem tumours than almost anyone in the world.”

Of his own expert witness, Professor Bryant Stokes, Teo said, “He is a nice man, but he doesn’t know as much about brain tumours as I do.”

Professor Bryant Stokes was called as a medical expert by Charlie Teo’s legal team.

Teo continues to maintain that his career has been beset by professional jealousy, and that envy was at the heart of the two complaints made against him, the outcome of which will be delivered some time this year.

On the eve of the hearing, he told a podcast that the proceedings had “nothing to do with fairness and what’s right or wrong … it’s all got to do with people’s agendas. And the agenda is to destroy Charlie Teo.”

However, his colleagues reject this.

In 2019, a Herald investigation interviewed 14 neurosurgeons and related specialists. Not one questioned Teo’s surgical skills. Instead, they raised serious questions about his judgment, narcissistic behaviour and charging financially stressed people exorbitant fees for questionable surgeries.

As one said, “No one is criticising his surgical skill. But good surgical practice is about so much more than that … it’s knowing when not to operate … It is crystal clear from a medical and a scientific perspective, that excising some of these tumours does nothing to improve life expectancy or address the cancer.”

Charlie Teo is greeted by supporters outside the disciplinary hearing this week.Credit:Nick Moir

While the hearing was in progress, Teo told the media that the two men who had complained about him must have been “hoodwinked” or “coerced” by his rivals. When grilled about this statement in the witness box, Teo offered no evidence for this statement except that he found it incomprehensible to think either had been unhappy with him. “He called me by my first name. I liked him, he liked me,” he said of the husband of a Geelong woman who died without regaining consciousness.

The three expert witnesses said this operation had resulted in the largest removal of brain matter they had seen. Teo took out most of the right frontal lobe, removing normal brain tissue and leaving behind a significant amount of the tumour.

The Geelong woman’s husband said: “All my savings and superannuation went on saving my wife. I had to sell our house and move into a retirement village.” On top of that, his daughter, a nurse, had to pay for an air ambulance to bring her unconscious and intubated mother back to Victoria, where she later died.

The committee heard that Teo did not explain the serious risks of comas or death to his patients. It was also suggested they did not have time to give proper informed consent as Teo had rushed them into having their surgeries.

Patient A, a 41-year-old mother of three young children, never got to say goodbye to her family in Perth as Teo had convinced her and her husband it was crucial she have surgery before Teo left for India.

Charlie Teo is greeted by supporters as he leaves the last day of a disciplinary inquiry.Credit:Nick Moir

Despite her biopsy report confirming that the woman had an incurable H3K27M-mutant diffuse midline glioma, Teo said it was operable and offered only a 5 per cent risk of death or coma.

But three experts disagreed. There was no data, no statistics, no medical literature to support Teo’s decision to operate on the woman, Associate Professor Andrew Morokoff told the committee.

After the operation, the woman remained in intensive care in Sydney for three weeks. At vast expense, her family paid for an air ambulance to medivac her across the country.

Her husband said he only spoke to Teo once after the operation.

While acknowledging his surgical outcome was very bad, a defiant Teo stood by his decision to perform the surgery. “My job is to give them some hope that maybe, maybe there’s a chance you can live a bit longer,” he said. “I would still offer the surgery.”

Teo made much of the fact that he hadn’t charged anything for this surgery. However, the account from the woman’s husband painted a somewhat different picture. He said he’d had a problem transferring the first $10,000 of Teo’s $35,000 fee. After the disastrous surgery, there was no further discussion of payment, he said.

A Teo supporter outside court this week.Credit:Peter Rae

Patient B, the woman from Geelong, was crying during her consultation with Teo. Her husband gave evidence that Teo said, “What the f— are you crying about? I’m here to fix you. You should be happy.” He said Teo told them: “If you don’t have the surgery by Tuesday, you’ll be f—ing dead by Friday.”

The husband could not have known that after Teo’s surgery, his wife would be effectively dead on Friday. She never regained consciousness and died on March 30, 2019, several weeks after her fateful surgery.

Once again, other doctors had warned against an operation to remove the woman’s tumour.

Experts told the hearing that not only was Teo’s removal of the woman’s right frontal lobe excessive, one expert said it was the “biggest he’d ever seen”. Teo had left behind a significant amount of the tumour.

This radical surgery was not something either explained or agreed to by the woman and her family.

“We paid $35,000 for my wife to die,” her husband said.

Two months after the Geelong woman’s death, Teo became the centre of a national debate when urologist Professor Henry Woo remarked on Twitter that there was something wrong with Australia’s health system when there were more than 100 GoFundMe campaigns to raise $100,000 for operations involving Teo.

“If it was valid surgery, it could/should be performed in the public system under Medicare,” Woo posted on Twitter.

Teo reacted angrily to Woo’s comments, claiming he only received between $8000 and $15,000 for brain tumour operations.

In the witness box, Teo said he did not discuss fees with his patients, or that the money had to be paid upfront. He said he left that to his staff on the desk. “I don’t discuss the money side of things. I will have to plead ignorance there,” he said.

Teo has also previously said he was unaware that his patients were asked to pay $800 in cash for an initial consultation. Once again, he blamed his office staff for this practice.

Outside the hearing, Teo was buoyed by the adulation from grateful patients and their families who had come from around the nation to support him.

“Do you really think they’d do that to support a callous, cold, money-hungry, reckless surgeon? I just don’t think so,” he said.

“You start self-doubting after a while.

“You know, am I that person? Am I really that terrible person?

“And when you see all these people supporting you, it gives you strength that maybe I did do the right thing.”

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